Are Cd-Rs on their way out?

[tweedledee]

I think that flash drives will kill off floppies soon. they hold more memory, and fit on your key chain. I can't think of a downside.

[SingSing]

CDR can retain data much longer than DVD+/-R/W. It will be around like floppy disk.

[RabidDog]

ALso zip drives died because only IOMEGA produced the blank discs .. and they charged muchos bucks .. a lesson there for new formats coming along?

There was also a 3 inch floppy disc, used in AMstrad computers and WP machines..

[Dv8ted2]

Fry's still sells and stocks tons of CD'R's.

[Dv8ted2]

I think that flash drives will kill off floppies soon. they hold more memory, and fit on your key chain. I can't think of a downside.

I can. There are computers that will not boot from a flash drive, yet they will from a floppy.

[RonBoy]

ALso zip drives died because only IOMEGA produced the blank discs .. and they charged muchos bucks .. a lesson there for new formats coming along?

There was also a 3 inch floppy disc, used in AMstrad computers and WP machines..

I've used ZIP 100 discs from Iomega, SONY and Maxell and seen some Fuji ZIP discs at Wal-Mart.

[yoda313]

For boot discs and flashing your motherboards firmware, floppy disks can stilly be neccessary (unfortunately).

Well my pc didn't come with a floppy drive - over a year old now. It does have several built in memory card ports so thats a much better option since they hold so much more.

Though I assume usb floppy drives are readily availble and cheap these days for those who still want to go the old shool route

[whitejremiah]

EVERY computer i have come upon within the last ten years has been able to somehow boot from a cd disc, that being said, all that really needs to be done as far as floppy stuff, is it needs to be direct copied over from the floppy to cdr and made bootable (if need be) right now you can still buy a new computer with a floppy drive on it, but it's becoming increasingly difficult, i do think that floppy very well may be on its way out, however as far as cdr....it wont die until at LEAST when itunes dies (probably not for a very long time) since people will want to burn the cd's that they purchase...let alone other things...they are still highly used for computer game backups as well (although dvd is finally starting to phase in, cd based is still more of a standard)

[SingSing]

When we can boot from DVD, then the days of CDR is numbered.

[lordsmurf]

You can already boot from a DVD. There is nothing more special about CD than DVD. Just optical data on a platter.

[Dv8ted2]

EVERY computer i have come upon within the last ten years has been able to somehow boot from a cd disc.

I have seen computers that would not boot from cd. There was no option in the bios. It was either boot from the hard drive or boot from floppy.

[robertazimmerman]

I'm not sure why people are comparing CD-Rs to DVD-Rs. Stating that CD-Rs are cheaper than DVD-Rs is irrelevent. The media are used for different purposes.

It's like saying that a dozen apples cost less than a dozen pencils.

roberta

[whitejremiah]

that being said, i dont know of too many standalone cd players that can play a dvdr disc (not counting outright dvd players......)dvdrom has been a bootable media since day 1, although i dont see it used too often (other than system restore discs and the liking) and Dv8ted2, i've seen em too...just not anytime recently, even my OLD computer which was a 400mhz celeron would boot from a cd disc.....and i suppose 10 years is probably a slight exaggeration, but definately within the last 5 years, i havent seen a system that couldnt boot from a cdrom

[Bodysurf]

When we can boot from DVD, then the days of CDR is numbered.

As others have wrote, booting from a DVD is nothing new. Fedora Cores have been available as bootable DVDs from day one. And since recordable DVDs are cheaper/MB than recordable CDs, I find myself burning less CDs and more DVDs.

That being said, I don't see CDRs going away anytime soon, even with the advent of iPods and the like, because there is no widely accepted replacement for "Red Book" audio CDs (DVD-Audio and SACD have been thouroughly rejected by the vast majority of consumers). Yes, rest assured long as audio CD players are still widely used and sold, you can count on recordable CDs begin around. My cars MP3 player accepts MP3s on CDRs but not DVDRs.

What we DO need is more acceptance for USB keydrives as replacements for floppy disks, in particular the ability for motherboard BIOS' to boot from them. Floppy disks have to be the most unreliable storage medium ever created by man and they can't go the way of the dodo fast enough for me.

[Bodysurf]

I think that flash drives will kill off floppies soon. they hold more memory, and fit on your key chain. I can't think of a downside.

There's only one really, everything else about USB keydrives are better. They are smaller, faster, hold more, more sturdy and infinitely more reliable.

Like dv8ted2 wrote, they aren't "bootable" often enough. If my current motherboards would support booting from them so I could do things like upgrade the BIOS, I wouldn't even have a floppy drive in my system. I understand more modern mainboard BIOS's are better in this regard.

As Theo says, a floppy disk is "one of the most unreliable pieces of storage known to man". I thoroughly agree.

[Paul_G]

CD-Rs will never fade out for many years to come, Shops saying otherwise do it to make people panic buy.

Reminds me of Dixons (uk electrical shop) saying they will stop selling video recorders a couple of years ago before christmas, still sell video recorders today but the panic buying tactics work every single time.

[mikesbytes]

There is one thing going for CD's that floppies, Zips and similar media doesn't have, that is that the drives that come with new computers can read them and will for sometime, as we tipically ship a new PC with one optical drive, currently DVD/CD and probably [one or both HD variants]/DVD/CD in the future

[SingSing]

I don't see CDRs going away anytime soon, even with the advent of iPods and the like, because there is no widely accepted replacement for "Red Book" audio CDs (DVD-Audio and SACD have been thouroughly rejected by the vast majority of consumers). Yes, rest assured long as audio CD players are still widely used and sold, you can count on recordable CDs begin around. My cars MP3 player accepts MP3s on CDRs but not DVDRs.

Very good point.